Rob Newman

Summary

I’m a senior/lead developer with 17 years experience of designing and developing reliable, scalable applications and APIs. I’ve written code that correctly handles tens of thousands of operations per second, provided technical leadership and mentorship for agile teams, and worked with other development teams and organisations, product owners, and customers to make sure the right thing gets built in a maintainable way. I have a passion for learning, for solving interesting problems, and for building things that make people’s life better.

Skills

Experience writing backends (and occasional frontends) using Python 2/3 (16 years) and Java 5/6/8/11 (12 years); some Rust, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Go. Familiarity with many libraries and frameworks in those languages, including:
- FastAPI/Starlette, Flask, boto3/aioboto3, SQLalchemy and Requests in Python;
- Spring Boot, Dropwizard, Netty and OSGi in Java
Knowledge of RDBMS and SQL (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite), graph databases (Sesame/RDF4J, Stardog) and messaging/streaming systems (SQS, Eventbridge, Kafka, MQTT)
Deployment, operation and management of services on AWS (both serverless using technologies such as lambdas as well as VM-based, using Terraform), Kubernetes, OpenStack and bare-metal servers (Linux using Ansible)
Familiarity with build, packaging and CI/CD tools such as Poetry, Gradle, Maven, OCI/Docker Containers and GitLab CI/CD.

Experience

Compare the Market: Senior Cloud Platform Engineer (2022 - present)

AWS (many services and features, including account provisioning, event-driven serverless APIs and architectures, and IAM roles/permissions); Python 3; Golang; Terraform

One of the more senior members of the Cloud Centre of Excellence team; responsible for:
- Re-building large portions of our AWS platform to follow AWS best practices. This allowed other teams within CtM to deploy cloud-native applications and services more quickly, safely, and securely.
- Consulting with other internal CtM teams (both within Cloud and the wider product organisation) regarding the best way to use AWS for their use-cases and applications
- Maintaining many of CtM’s existing operational tools and processes, including the in-house Golang-based deployment tooling
Introducted build and deployment strategies to Cloud to allow serverless services and functions to be built in a testable and reproducable way
In the process of re-architecting and migrating the company-wide cloud priviledged access service to one that’s more secure, reliable and better fits with CtM’s needs

Zoopla: Senior Backend Developer & Technical Lead (2020 - 2022)

Python 3; PostgreSQL; AWS (including RDS, SQS, ECS, Eventbridge); Golang; RESTful & event-based APIs; Terraform; Perl

Led a core backend team responsible for providing near-realtime property listing data to Zoopla applications and services (including the zoopla.co.uk property portal)
- Provided technical direction and mentorship for the team, and worked with other teams, product owners, and technical leadership to design new features and co-ordinate software development and rollout
- Architected migration from a legacy Perl and EC2 customer-facing API to a more scalable, less complex, less expensive, Python-based pipeline
- Led efforts to develop new REST and RPC APIs (and document/define SLOs for existing ones), allowing other teams to use datasets our team maintained in a self-serve fashion
- Re-developed team Gitlab CI pipelines to allow for faster, more correct automated builds and deployments
- Developed and deployed new features and services (particularly in Python); maintained and added capabilities to existing legacy applications (particularly in Golang and Perl)

EXFO/Ontology Partners: Senior Developer & Lead Architect Nova Context (2017 - 2020)

Java 8/11, OSGi, RDF4J and Stardog; Kubernetes; Ansible; Terraform; Docker

Acted as architectural lead for my product division, working the with wider EXFO architecture community to define standards and direction.
- Worked with representatives of other business units to develop recommendations for transitioning to a cloud-native development and deployment approach
- Developed and led portions of cross-team Kubernetes workshops, introducing concepts like tracing and distributed logging
Developed frontend and backend product features and improvements for the core Ontology big-data graph platform
- Re-wrote platform indexing capabilities to injest terabytes of raw data produced by dozens of threads more quickly and with fewer failures
- Led efforts to deploy the platform and dependencies using OCI containers

Elsevier/Mendeley: Technical Lead for the Access & Onboarding Team (2016 - 2017)

Java 8; Dropwizard; AWS; Terraform; OpenID; Docker

Led backend work to migrate users from a legacy internal Mendeley database to a new company-wide OpenID Connect-based authentication platform. Worked with product owners, front end developers and other development teams across Elsevier to design a secure migration process
Developed backend features to ease sign-up, better integrate disparate microservices, and increase security
Acted as the technical point-of-contact for the team, and mentored and advised junior developers

OpenMarket: Developer/Technical Lead for the EMEA/APAC Messaging Platform (2007 - 2016)

Java 5/6/8; MySQL; HTTP and binary protocols in a variety of formats; bare-metal Linux deployments

Archtected and led development of replacement horizontally-scalable SMS routing and delivery platform, able to handle up to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second
Worked with other teams in the UK and US to refine the design and develop replacement public-facing RESTful and binary APIs
Core platform development, including re-writing core thread- and NIO-based networking code, developing integrations with third-party suppliers, and developing and maintaining the authoratitive billing data source for the platform

Education

University of Warwick (2003-2007): Graduated with a 2:1 Masters degree in Computer Science